#cherokee children massacre

[hikercarl]

Discover Yahoo Falls: Kentucky's Hidden Waterfall Gem

In the heart of the Appalachian region, Kentucky has a hidden treasure. It’s called Yahoo Falls. This waterfall is the tallest in the state, standing tall at 113 feet. It’s a must-see for those who love nature and adventure. Located in the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area, Yahoo Falls is a hidden gem. It’s often overlooked compared to Cumberland Falls. But, those who find it are…

[lyledebeast]

Male Homosociality and War Crimes in The Patriot

Of all the problems The Patriot as a story creates for itself, the most interesting for me has always been this: how do you craft a villain when the hero is also a war criminal? It appears to me the filmmakers had a simple answer to this question staring them right in their faces, so why does a story that leans so heavily on the rumor that Banastre Tarleton habitually ordered the execution of surrendering Continental soldiers do absolutely nothing with the rumor that he habitually raped and allowed his men to rape colonial women? Surely, that would have helped to make Colonel Tavington as despicable as we are clearly meant to find him, particularly since the Patriot soldiers do not engage in rape, at least not literally. Instead, both Benjamin Martin and Tavington are tried by juries of their peers with Martin being nearly universally adored and Tavington being as nearly universally despised. This approach creates two problems. First, it means the Patriots, who something tells me are the people the audience is meant to sympathize with, are okay with some very fucked up actions both past and present. It also makes it hard to justify the Patriots' hatred for the British as whole when the audience sees how little support Tavington has.

Somewhat ironically given the myths about Tarleton, the only characters to directly mention rape in the film are Patriots, a father and son. As the Martin family anticipates survivors of the battle being in near proximity to them, Nathan attempts to titillates his siblings with this dire prediction: "They'll probably kill us men and do lord knows what to you women." In addition to shock among some in the audience, this elicits the question that always arises when a child says something incredibly fucked up: where did you hear that? Judging from her disgusted reaction, I do not think it was his caregiver Abigale. We get an answer some months later when Benjamin describes the events leading up to the Fort Wilderness massacre. "[The French and Cherokess] had killed all the settlers. The men . . . with the women and some of the children they had . . . we buried them." In the moment, Martin's hesitancy to name the particular violence these settlers suffered seems to speak to respect for them, but if so, he failed to convey that to either the son who makes the prediction earlier on or the even younger boy who giggles at it. This is the first time violence is referenced as a means of male bonding; it is certainly not the last.

The conversation between Martin and his oldest son referenced above is bizarre for a couple of reasons. Not only does the narrative twist Martin's confession to war crimes against the French and Cherokees in reprisal into evidence of his morality (he feels so bad about it!), but Gabriel is thoroughly nonplussed by this confession. He shifts the topic to his murdered brother and his desire to avenge him, but not at the expense of "the cause." Why is Gabriel so eager to take his father's supposed contrition at face value when he has personally seen him both hack a man's back to shreds with a tomahawk and participate in the murder of surrendering British soldiers a hell of a lot more recently than the French and Indian War? By the end of his life, Gabriel does more than tolerate his father's violent past. He approaches Tavington's prone form, believing him to be mortally wounded, to repeat it.

Bonding with his son through discussion of war crimes is not an anomaly among Martin's relationships. When he and Major Villeneuve recruit in the tavern, two of the men who sign up are acquaintances of Martin's from the previous war. One of them inquires about bounties and Martin give the intriguing response of "No scalp bounty this time, Rollins, but I'll pay for the gear of any redcoat you kill." How Rollins is going to prove the gear belonged to redcoats he killed who were not wounded or surrendering after Martin issues his orders against such conduct is a mystery the movie never clears up . When the other acquaintance, Billings, asks Martin if he is one of "that sort--" the sort Gabriel believes should not serve in the militia because, well, they're war criminals--Martin jokingly tells him, "You're the sort that gives that sort a bad name." Just boys being boys!

My favorite use of war crimes to further male bonding is the bizarre relationship between Martin and his second in command, Major Villeneuve. Initially the two grate on each other: Martin tortured French soldiers to death, while Villeneuve is French. The two offenses are presented as carrying basically equal weight. Ultimately, though, Villeneuve's objection to Martin is less that he committed war crimes but that he forbids Villeneuve from doing the same. But over time, they come to see each other in a different light. When Martin greets Villeneuve after the militia's ill-fated furlough, Villeneuve responds with a tongue in cheek, "Where else can I kill a few redcoats? Perhaps a few wounded ones when you're not looking." That Martin laughs nervously at this joke should be surprising, but it really isn't. While we haven't seen any wounded or surrendering men killed since Martin's order, nor have we seen any in militia custody. Has Villeneuve had a change of heart, or is Martin simply skilled in looking the other way? Later, Martin asks Villeneuve what color his slain daughters' eyes were as they march into the final battle, psyching him up to go and do their favorite activity together: vengeance! This shared priority, the only thing they have in common, outweighs their shortcomings in each other's eyes. Liberté, fraternité, and all that jazz.

Most of Martin's screentime, and he is in almost every scene, is spent developing his homosocial bonds, but even British men seem to regard Tavington with varying degrees of contempt, disgust, and fear. This lack of fellowship even characterizes his scenes with his own Green Dragoons. There are only two opportunities for dragoon comradery depicted in the movie: one where Tavington interrupts his men at dinner and one where he is grooming himself in the creek while they eat around their campfires. Tavington being left out of eating and drinking in particular becomes a recurring theme. His first meeting with Cornwallis, in the extended cut, happens after the Battle of Camden when the British officers are celebrating their victory. Tavington arrives late, apparently hungry from the way he immediately reaches for the food on the table, withdrawing his hand when Cornwallis draws closer to scold him. As he's dressing down Tavington, Cornwallis takes food from the same table and feeds it to his Great Danes. The exchange ends with Cornwallis proposing a toast, turning his back on Tavington and his second, who do not have glasses. The scene establishes that his role in winning a battle in no way makes Tavington's treatment of the enemy or civilians less odious, and his fellow officers are so united in this that no one so much as blinks when their general is incredibly rude to him. Over the course of the movie, they all maintain this conviction, except for one.

Producer Dean Devlin's describes Tavington as "seduc[ing]" Cornwallis into allowing him his brutal tactics, and this seems especially apt given the way their relationship develops on screen. As they grow closer tactically, they also grow closer physically. In their scene after Cornwallis ices Tavington out of his tent, Cornwallis remains seated at his desk while demanding that Tavington, who is standing on the opposite side, cease his brutal methods. In the scene following Cornwallis's humiliation at Martin's hands during the prisoner exchange, he is again seated at a table, eating dinner, while Tavington stands on the other side. From this point forward, though, there is a marked shift in the two men's positions. Cornwallis motions Tavington forward, and Tavingon approaches, putting as much space between himself and Cornwallis as we see between the general and the servant waiting on him as Cornwallis says, "I want you to capture [Martin]." If he intends to remind Tavington of his own servile position, the message does not register. Tavington takes a little stroll, peeks at Cornwallis's map, and helps himself to a glass of his claret, a stand-in for the glass he was denied at their first meeting. He assures Cornwallis, "I alone will assume the full mantle of responsibility, rendering you blameless" for his future crimes in pursuit of Martin. In light of Devlin's description of this scene, it does sound a bit like, Don't worry, babe, no one is going to know about this but you and me.

It is a ridiculous claim. When the Green Dragoons go on a veritable murder and arson spree after months of abstinence, it does not take a genius to realize that maybe the general of the whole fucking British army might have something to do with that. Nonetheless, by the end of this scene Cornwallis and Tavington are standing side by side for the first time in the movie. Their last scene is even more elicit. Cornwallis walks in on Tavington having his wound dressed to warn him against an early charge, the very same thing he scolds him for in their first scene, but this time Tavington is only in his shirt and his hair is loose and . . . it's a little on the nose, to be honest. And they're all alone. As powerful as Cornwallis is, he is also the only person Tavington ever convinces to condone his actions, and he can only do so by offering assurances he could not possibly grant. What does not change is the conviction of everyone in the British Army, Tavington included, that they will live and be remembered in infamy until the end of time if they do Bad Things to the Patriots. Meanwhile, the Patriots are bonding with each other almost exclusively through planning and doing Bad Things to them.

There are double-standards, and then there's this bullshit. Martin commits a dizzying amount of fuckery ranging from sending the Cherokees pieces of their fighters in bags to terrorize them into compliance to ordering his young sons to kill soldiers to apparently talking about rape in front of those sons in a way that left them thinking it is something to laugh about, and he is seen as a hero and a loving father by everyone around him. Tavington walks into a tent full of his fellow officers after a battle he helped win, and they all look at him like "Who invited Murder Molly?" Martin's men are devoted to him not in spite of his past war crimes but because of them, and the movie's insistence that he has changed his ways is, in the most generous terms, feeble. The thinly veiled homoeroticism of Tavingtion and Cornwallis's relationship only serves to underscore how marginal their position that war crimes can be justified under the right circumstances is among the British. Among the Patriots, that position appears to be standard.

Representing Tarleton's dragoons as the rapists some people of the time believed they were would obviously not have been great from a historical perspective, but it would be a drop in the ocean of inaccuracies the movie is adrift in. And it would have at least made the redcoats as bad as the characters the audience is meant to support! Both sides ultimately do terrible things, but they are framed by the narrative very differently in ways that inadvertently present the British in a favorable light. While the Patriots treat the vilest of war's excesses with understanding and sometimes even levity, the British have a horror of the idea that war exceeds the limits of the battlefield that is hard to fathom in professional soldiers. In the homosocial world of The Patriot, the ultimate measure of virtue lies not in actions but in the approval of other men.

[pheonix1t23]

According to a 2019 United Nations report titled The Economic Costs of the Israeli Occupation for the Palestinian People: The Unrealized Oil and Natural Gas Potential, “Geologists and natural resources economists have confirmed that the Occupied Palestinian Territory lies above sizeable reservoirs of oil and natural gas wealth.” They estimate that the Palestinians are sitting atop 1.5 billion barrels of oil with an estimated value of $100 billion. Additionally, the UN estimates that Israel’s apartheid policies have thus far deprived the Palestinians of $2.57 billion in natural gas reserves.

The collapse of the “State of Israel” has dominated the world’s media as has nothing before it. The world stands in awe as the “People of the Book”—the “Chosen of God” and the “Light Unto Nations”—phosphorus bombs Gaza’s hospitals, refugee camps, and neighborhoods, obliterating the Palestinians like they were Navahos, Algonquins, or Cherokees. In fact, Israel’s savagery is an almost exact replica of a massacre 387 years ago when the “Pilgrims”—another people who believed in their own divinity—trapped some 700 Pequot, mostly women and children, near the Mystic River in New England and attacked them with unrelenting military force. Their leader, William Bradford, wrote proudly of their psychopathic massacre: “To see them frying in the fire, and the streams of their blood quenching the same, and the stench was horrible; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave praise thereof to God.”

To date, the United Nations says Israel has attacked more than 250 health care facilities in Gaza and the West Bank, including hospitals, clinics, ambulances, and their patients. As of this writing more than 30,000 Palestinians have been murdered, more than half of them women and children. To the Synagogue of Satan “the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave praise thereof to God.”

The Money Behind Genocide

And as the world is watching a genocide for the first time captured in real time, people may not be aware that they are not watching a religious conflict at all. Rather, they are witnessing an economically motivated depopulation movement to gain control of yet more oil and gas reserves. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu echoes the words of Deuteronomy 25:17 in posing Israel’s “war” with the Palestinians as the fulfilment of biblical prophecy: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible,” the Jewish leader said, aligning himself with the genocidal crusade of King Saul, who was ordered to “put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.”

[pearlnoble]

# PEARLNOBLE : an independent original character SHEI YUHAN from gennedy tartakovsky's animated show -- SYM BIONIC TITAN. governed by moe.

𝙸𝙽𝚃𝚁𝙾𝙳𝚄𝙲𝚃𝙸𝙾𝙽. my name is moe (she/her) twenty-three. I am black and cherokee indian. I am undiagnosed with ADHD and so that means that my activity on this blog is medium to low, especially since I have multiple blogs for other canon and original characters.

𝚆𝚁𝙸𝚃𝙸𝙽𝙶 𝚂𝚃𝚈𝙻𝙴. my style of writing will vary throughout my storytelling on this blog but what will remain is the icons and small text. My mutuals are not required to use icons with their replies or even match my choice of text size -- all I ask is to make the replies easy to read and understand.

𝙼𝙰𝚃𝚄𝚁𝙴 𝙲𝙾𝙽𝚃𝙴𝙽𝚃. this blog will feature dark and triggering content not suitable for the easily triggered. The following content goes as said: death, parental death, murder, political corruption, espionage, child death, pregnancy / childbirth / miscarriage, genocide, massacres, blackmail, numerous war crimes, etc. Everything will be tagged accordingly.

𝙵𝙾𝙻𝙻𝙾𝚆𝙸𝙽𝙶. I don't always follow everyone back, it's absolutely nothing personal. I just don't see how our muses could interact. If you want to plot with me please come with an idea of some kind -- otherwise I won't be interested.

𝚄𝙽𝙵𝙾𝙻𝙻𝙾𝚆𝙸𝙽𝙶. I usually soft block if I don't want to follow someone anymore or they make me uncomfortable. The same is applied for me, block me if I make you uncomfortable or you don't have an interest in following me anymore, there won't be any hard feelings.

COMMUNICATION. That being said however, I am a strong advocate for communicating with my partners. You need to tell me upfront if I've done something that made you uncomfortable. Otherwise, I won't know and therefore can't correct myself or maturely address the issue.

Before she became the imperial wife of Emperor Shang, Shei Yuhan started out as a war orphan stricken by poverty like many others. Taken in from the cold and harsh elements of the planet Ethora, Shei underwent intense training in the art of being an assassin a female teacher that would later be revealed to be the Late Empress Yan Qhe -- the mother of her future husband, Shang Qhe.

From palace servant to an imperial guard, a tenacious and quick witted Shei grew close to Prince Shang during the years they spent together and gained a praised favor from his father, Grand Emperor Don Xhao who trusted her enough spy between his imperial wives for any ulterior motives and scheming out of concern for the safety of his son. Ethora and Galaluna secured an alliance between their respective planets and their military. Prince Shang has known Princess Ilana since they were young children and he has a great deal of respect to the princess.

coming soon.

Coming soon.

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 12.14 (after 1950)

1955 – Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Ceylon, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Jordan, Laos, Libya, Nepal, Portugal, Romania and Spain join the United Nations through United Nations Security Council Resolution 109. 1958 – The 3rd Soviet Antarctic Expedition becomes the first to reach the southern pole of inaccessibility. 1960 – Convention against Discrimination in Education of UNESCO is adopted. 1962 – NASA's Mariner 2 becomes the first spacecraft to fly by Venus. 1963 – The dam containing the Baldwin Hills Reservoir bursts, killing five people and damaging hundreds of homes in Los Angeles, California. 1964 – American Civil Rights Movement: Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States: The Supreme Court of the United States rules that Congress can use the Constitution's Commerce Clause to fight discrimination. 1971 – Bangladesh Liberation War: Over 200 of East Pakistan's intellectuals are executed by the Pakistan Army and their local allies. (The date is commemorated in Bangladesh as Martyred Intellectuals Day.) 1972 – Apollo program: Eugene Cernan is the most recent person to walk on the Moon, after he and Harrison Schmitt complete the third and final extravehicular activity (EVA) of the Apollo 17 mission. 1981 – Arab–Israeli conflict: Israel's Knesset ratifies the Golan Heights Law, extending Israeli law to the Golan Heights. 1985 – Wilma Mankiller takes office as the first woman elected to serve as Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation. 1986 – Qasba Aligarh massacre: Over 400 Muhajirs killed in revenge killings in Qasba colony after a raid on Pashtun heroin processing and distribution center in Sohrab Goth by the security forces. 1992 – War in Abkhazia: Siege of Tkvarcheli: A helicopter carrying evacuees from Tkvarcheli is shot down, resulting in at least 52 deaths, including 25 children. The incident catalyses more concerted Russian military intervention on behalf of Abkhazia. 1994 – Construction begins on the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze river. 1995 – Yugoslav Wars: The Dayton Agreement is signed in Paris by the leaders of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. 1998 – Yugoslav Wars: The Yugoslav Army ambushes a group of Kosovo Liberation Army fighters attempting to smuggle weapons from Albania into Kosovo, killing 36. 1999 – Torrential rains cause flash floods in Vargas, Venezuela, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths, the destruction of thousands of homes, and the complete collapse of the state's infrastructure. 2003 – Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf narrowly escapes an assassination attempt. 2004 – The Millau Viaduct, the tallest bridge in the world, is formally inaugurated near Millau, France. 2012 – Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting: Twenty-eight people, including the gunman, are killed in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. 2013 – A reported coup attempt in South Sudan leads to continued fighting and hundreds of casualties. 2017 – The Walt Disney Company announces that it would acquire 21st Century Fox, including the 20th Century Fox movie studio, for $52.4 billion. 2020 – A total solar eclipse is visible from parts of the South Pacific Ocean, southern South America, and the South Atlantic Ocean.

[oklahomahistory]

Creek Civil War

Centered by the 1810s in the Alabama River Valley, the Upper Creeks were led by the determined Opothleyahola. Though not engulfed in the Yamasee War of a century before, they held conservative, traditionalist beliefs with little interest in assimilating into American culture or embracing American institutions. To the east in Georgia along the Chattahoochee, Ocmulgee, and Flint Rivers, lived the Lower Creeks, who had their own strong leader, William McIntosh. Ironically, though desperate foes of the English and proto-Americans in the Yamasee War, they now possessed a more “progressive" philosophy and favored adoption of most American ways, including education, commerce, technology, and the Christian faith.The philosophical divide between the Upper and Lower Creeks exploded into violent civil war in the Red Stick War (1813-14). Influenced by the great Shawnee chief and war captain Tecumseh, Opothleyahola simultaneously led the Upper Creeks (Red Sticks, for their red war clubs and their shamans’ supposed magical red sticks) into a disastrous alliance with the British during America’s second war with Britain, the War of 1812. The Lower Creeks, meanwhile, sided with the American colonists. This conflict, incited by atrocities such as the Upper Creek massacre of nearly 250 white settlers and Lower Creek men, women, and children at Fort Mims, near Mobile, Alabama, culminated in the Upper Creeks’ bloody defeat at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814. The victorious American forces in that famous fight included General and future President Andrew Jackson, future “Father of Texas” Sam Houston, the Cherokees, the Choctaws, and most of the Lower Creeks. After their landmark pummeling at Horseshoe Bend, the Upper Creeks retreated to a more subtle rejection of American ways. But their anger and bitterness at those—and the Lower Creeks support of them-simmered, to flash into bloodshed again later. The United States government The Creeks voted in a death did more penalty for any tribesman than simmer. who attempted to sell Creek They forced land to white settlers. the Creeks to cede twenty-two million acres of land in Alabama and Georgia and then pressured them to move west. All this triggered long-term as well as shortterm consequences for the tribe. It turned the majority of Creeks so strongly against further land cessions, including an exchange for lands out west, that they determined to give up no more land to the Americans. They also voted in a death penalty for any tribesman who attempted to sell Creek land to white settlers. Sadly, opinions on the land issue were not unanimous within the tribe. “Red Stick” Upper Creeks massacring white settlers, Lower Creeks, and militia in 1813 at Fort Mims, near Mobile, Alabama. Such bloodshed led to the Upper Creeks’ crushing defeat by the U. S. and its Indian allies at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814  Read the entire Oklahoma story in John J. Dwyer’s The Oklahomans: The Story of Oklahoma and Its People volume 1 of a 2-part series on the 46th state and the people who make this state very special.

[96thdayofrage]

Unlike Black Americans across the country after slavery, Williams’ ancestors and thousands of other Black members of slave-owning Native American nations freed after the war “had land,” says Williams, a Tulsa community activist. “They had opportunity to build a house on that land, farm that land, and they were wealthy with their crops.”

“And that was huge — a great opportunity and you’re thinking this is going to last for generations to come. I can leave my children this land, and they can leave their children this land,” recounts Williams, whose ancestor went from enslaved laborer to judge of the Muscogee Creek tribal Supreme Court after slavery.

In fact, Alaina E. Roberts, an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh, writes in her book “I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land,” the freed slaves of five Native American nations “became the only people of African descent in the world to receive what might be viewed as reparations for their enslavement on a large scale.”

Why that happened in the territory that became Oklahoma, and not the rest of the slaveholding South: The U.S. government enforced stricter terms for reconstruction on the slave-owning American Indian nations that had fully or partially allied with the Confederacy than it had on Southern states.

While U.S. officials quickly broke Gen. William T. Sherman’s famous Special Field Order No. 15 providing 40 acres for each formerly enslaved family after the Civil War, U.S. treaties compelled five slave-owning tribes — the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, Muscogee Creek and Seminoles — to share tribal land and other resources and rights with freed Black people who had been enslaved.

By 1860, about 14% of the total population of that tribal territory of the future state of Oklahoma were Black people enslaved by tribal members. After the Civil War, the Black tribal Freedmen held millions of acres in common with other tribal members and later in large individual allotments.

The difference that made is “incalculable,” Roberts said in an interview. “Allotments really gave them an upward mobility that other Black people did not have in most of the United States.”

The financial stability allowed Black Native American Freedmen to start businesses, farms and ranches, and helped give rise to Black Wall Street and thriving Black communities in the future state of Oklahoma. The prosperity of those communities — many long since vanished —“attracted Black African Americans from the South, built them up as a Black mecca,” Roberts says. Black Wall Street alone had roughly 200 businesses.

Meeting the Black tribal Freedmen in the thriving Black city of Boley in 1905, Booker T. Washington wrote admiringly of a community “which shall demonstrate the right of the negro, not merely as an individual, but as a race, to have a worthy and permanent place in the civilization that the American people are creating.”

And while some tribes reputedly gave their Black members some of the worst, rockiest, unfarmable land, that was often just where drillers struck oil starting in the first years of the 20th century, before statehood changed Indian Territory to Oklahoma in 1907. For a time it made the area around Tulsa the world’s biggest oil producer.

For Eli Grayson, another descendant of Muscogee Creek Black Freedmen, any history that tries to tell the story of Black Wall Street without telling the story of the Black Indian Freedmen and their land is a flop.

“They’re missing the point of what caused the wealth, the foundation of the wealth,” Grayson says.

The oil wealth, besides helping put the bustle and boom in Tulsa’s Black-owned Greenwood business district, gave rise to fortunes for a few Freedpeople that made headlines around the United States. That included 11-year-old Sarah Rector, a Muscogee Creek girl hailed as “the richest colored girl in the world” by newspapers of the time. Her oil fortune drew attention from Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois, who intervened to check that Rector’s white guardian wasn’t pillaging her money.

The wealth from the tribal allotment also gave rise to Williams’ family story of great-aunt Janie, “who learned to drive by going behind the trolley lines” in Tulsa, with her parents in the car, Williams’ uncle, 67-year-old Samuel Morgan, recounted, laughing.

“It was real fashionable, because it was one of the cars that had four windows that rolled all the way up,” Morgan said.

Little of that Black wealth remains today.

In May 1921, 100 years ago this month, Aunt Janie, then a teenager, had to flee Greenwood’s Dreamland movie theater as the white mob burned Black Wall Street to the ground, killing scores or hundreds — no one knows — and leaving Greenwood an empty ruin populated by charred corpses.

Black Freedmen and many other American Indian citizens rapidly lost land and money to unscrupulous or careless white guardians that were imposed upon them, to property taxes, white scams, accidents, racist policies and laws, business mistakes or bad luck. For Aunt Janie, all the family knows today is a vague tale of the oil wells on her land catching fire.

Williams, Grayson and other Black Indian Freedmen descendants today drive past the spots in Tulsa that family history says used to belong to them: 51st Street. The grounds of Oral Roberts University. Mingo Park.

That’s yet another lesson Tulsa’s Greenwood has for the rest of the United States, says William A. Darity Jr., a leading scholar and writer on reparations at Duke University.

If freed Black people had gotten reparations after the Civil War, Darity said, assaults like the Tulsa Race Massacre show they would have needed years of U.S. troop deployments to protect them — given the angry resentment of white people at seeing money in Black hands.

[twospiritstooprideful]

90% of the pre-colonial Native American population were wiped-out when the Europeans came

Mostly by disease—smallpox, the flu, ETC—yes, but there were also the massacres

I'm sure you have, at least, heard of the saying "Bury my heart at Wounded Knee"

It is the title of a book by Dee Brown

At Wounded Knee, at least 321 died, and 83 were wounded, most of the casualties and fatalities were civilians and of the Lakota people, about 85%

And, you know of the Trail of Tears, the forceful deportation of the Cherokee, Seminole, Chickasaw, Muscogee, and Choctaw from their native homelands of the American Southeast into what is now Oklahoma. Over 12,000 died by most estimates. Those five tribes never fully recovered

And, the one important to me for it was done onto my own people: the Long Walk. It was much the same as the Trail of Tears, the Navajo—my people—were removed from their homes and forced to walk from Fort Defiance to Fort Sumner in Bosque Redondo where the Great Chief Manuelito signed the Treaty of Bosque Redondo, and my people were forced to talk back to their homes. Over 2,500 died. The pregnant, due to so little food being provided by the U.S. army, often miscarried or gave stillbirth, if they even lived through the birth itself. The elderly who couldn't keep up were shot and thrown into ditches to be forgotten. Many died in the harsh sunlight during the day, and the bitter coldness of the night. Many children starved or fell to the elements. Those who stopped to mourn or to grieve were shot. Left like dogs to rot. Modern day geneticists believe that this great calamity caused a genetic bottleneck, and raregenetic disorders, like xeroderma pigmentosum which afflicts the body's way to absorb UV rays and the nervous system, causes auditory lost, seizures, and skin and brain cancer. The Long Walk is known to us today as simply "Hwéeldi." Suffering.

But we are still here—they are still here—I am still here

This is not to guilt you, O white person reading this, not in the slightest

This is to inform you

and to implore you to, please, join me in mourning the hundreds of thousands dead due to this genocide on this "Thanks"giving day

Please, don't let it happen again

Happy Thanksgiving!

You all know why I am saying this.

[fatenumberfor]

“...I’ve been in the business of teaching Black history for over three decades, and every colleague I know includes Tulsa in their general survey courses. So why do we continually repeat the assertion that this history is completely unknown, a secret, or so shameful no one wants to talk about it? Because the issue has never been about not knowing; it is about a refusal to acknowledge genocidal, state-sanctioned racist violence in the United States, a refusal to recognize the existence of fascism in this country. This is not to say the violence is simply denied by the status quo. No, rather it is disavowed by the white propertied and political classes and displaced onto “ignorant” white racist workers. This narrative obscures how the violence, fomented and promoted by the press and business interests, became a pretext to take the land — an attempted land grab that continued for decades after 1921. [...]

...in telling the story, we focus solely on “Black Wall Street,” which made up just a few blocks of the 35-40 square blocks of Greenwood the mobs destroyed. All we really hear about are doctors and lawyers and entrepreneurs, Black-owned theaters and the luxurious Stradford Hotel, when, in fact, the vast majority of Black Tulsans beaten, killed and displaced were working people. [...] We live in such a materialist, celebrity culture that we measure our “success” by class mobility, by wealth accumulation, and then we fall victim to a tired narrative that white folks destroyed “our” communities out of jealousy over of our success. While there is truth to this, and white looting is clear evidence, the “jealousy” is cultivated, nurtured in the ideology of white supremacy, usually in the guise of patriotism and nationalism, or in the capitalist replacement theory — “N*****s are coming for your jobs!” The mob was largely made up of shock troops engaged in an attempted land grab from which they themselves would not directly benefit. The first spark for the mob wasn’t real estate, but another form of property rooted in patriarchy — property in women. A Black man accused of assaulting a white woman is a more effective dog whistle than Negroes with grand pianos and bank accounts. The second spark, of course, were Negroes with guns. Here we see Black solidarity and fearlessness on full display — Black World War I veterans representing all classes within Greenwood, armed and prepared to defend one of their own, their people and their property. That act of insubordination, more than anything else, convinced white folks to fuel up their planes and build an arsenal. [...]

...Some Black people got to Oklahoma by way of the forced march of the Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees and Seminoles from the Southeastern territories in the 1830s. Some came as slaves of wealthy tribal members, others as spouses and children — part African, part Indigenous. And many died along the way. Later, Black folks joined the exodus out of the South after the Civil War by taking advantage of the Homestead Act to acquire land and create all-Black towns — Oklahoma being a prime destination. But again, on whose land? ...I don’t think the issue of the Tulsa race massacre of 1921 can ever be fully resolved or “repaired” without addressing the question of both holocausts — Indigenous dispossession and African slavery. [...]

...American liberty was built on slavery and dispossession because liberty was fundamentally about property rights. ...liberals hold on to the idea that in the U.S. democracy is a creed passed down to us via these great documents — this myth, if we’re to be honest, has driven the liberal wing of the civil rights movement for decades and still drives it today. [...] I’m less concerned with paranoid right-wing white nationalists than I am with (neo)liberal multiculturalists who side-step the question of power... [...]

...while in principle I can agree that all Black people live with the possibility of being terrorized by whiteness, the possibilities are differential based on class, gender, age, disability, etc. [...] If we only remember the loss of property and wealth and the evisceration of a Black elite, then we only imagine a potential future in which someone like J.B. Stradford could have been the Black “Hilton,” where the wealthy are wealthier, and projected “reparations” payments are calculated based on accumulated property at the time of the violence. Despite recognizing that the entire community suffered, “compensation” would be differential, mirroring the very system of racial capitalism that structured enclosure (segregation), violence, deep inequality and poverty for most, and premature death. We will also forget what might be the most impactful response by the community: mutual aid, a caring culture, and the impulse toward self-defense and protecting one another. [...]

...In our Herrenvolk Republic, liberalism was founded on a definition of liberty that places property before human freedom (and human needs), and an exclusionary definition of the human that permits various forms of unfree labor, dispossession and subordination based on “race” and “gender.” And yet, we keep speaking of the Tulsa race massacre in terms of property, property rights, property destroyed. I think we need to talk about decolonization in order to advance beyond land as property toward a vision of freedom not based on ownership or possession or anthropocentrism. The land has been enslaved and needs liberation so the Earth could flourish, so people could flourish, so the historical and contemporary structures of violence might end, opening up a radically different future.”

[whx-m]

The Indian Adoption Project was a federal program that acquired Indian children from 1958 to 1967 with the help of the prestigious Child Welfare League of America; a successor organization, the Adoption Resource Exchange of North America, functioned from 1966 until the early 1970s. Churches were also involved. In the Southwest, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints took thousands of Navajo children to live in Mormon homes and work on Mormon farms, and the Catholic Church and other Christian denominations swept many more Indian youngsters into residential institutions they ran nationwide, from which some children were then fostered or adopted out. As many as one third of Indian children were separated from their families between 1941 and 1967, according to a 1976 report by the Association on American Indian Affairs.

“People have heard of the boarding-school era and know it was bad, but they don’t know our adoption era even exists,” said White Hawk, who was taken from her family on the Rosebud reservation as a toddler in the mid-1950s. “A few small studies of adult adoptees have been done, and we’re just learning how to talk about what happened. We need think tanks and conferences and scientific research to explore what occurred and how it affected us.”

Then, White Hawk said, that information can inform current Indian child-welfare cases. “When experts take the stand to testify in a child-welfare hearing [about placement of a child or termination of parental rights, for example], they need academic backup to explain the relationship between, for example, suicide and being disconnected from your culture,” she explained. “The courts want Ph.D.-level research to back up what we tell them.”

A paper by Carol Locust, Cherokee, describes Native adoptees suffering from what she calls Split Feather Syndrome—the damage caused by loss of tribal identity and growing up “different” in an inhospitable world. Lost Bird is another term researchers have used to refer to the group, recalling one of the earliest Indian adoptees. A Lakota infant who survived the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee sheltered by the frozen corpse of her mother was claimed as a war trophy by a general who named her Lost Bird, according to her biographer, Renée Sansome Flood in Lost Bird of Wounded Knee.

Thanks to copious newspaper coverage of the massacre and its aftermath, Lost Bird became her generation’s celebrity adoptee, but fame did not save her from a fate that was a harbinger for too many Native children. She endured intolerance and isolation, and when she rebelled as a teenager, was shipped back to her birth family, where she no longer fit in. After a stint in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and the loss of three children—two died and she gave away the third, according to Flood—Lost Bird was felled by influenza in 1920, at the age of 30. “Throughout her life of prejudice, exploitation, poverty, misunderstanding and disease, she never gave up hope that one day she would find out where she really belonged,” Flood wrote.

At the summits and other events White Hawk has organized or spoken at since 2003, modern-day adoptees have recounted their dramatic life journeys, sometimes for the first time. “The stories vary from the most abusive to the most beautiful, but that’s not the point,” she said. “Even in loving families, Native adoptees live without a sense of who they are. Love doesn’t provide identity.”

“I never felt sorry for myself,” said St. John, “but if I ever got hurt, it wounded me to my soul, because I felt no one was there for me.” In recent years, he has found his birth mother and connected emotionally with his adoptive parents. “They were so young, in their 20s, when a priest convinced them to adopt four Sioux boys from South Dakota. It was too much—for all of us.”

During the adoption era almost any issue—from minor to serious—could precipitate the loss of an Indian child. Two Native people interviewed prior to the summit said they were separated from their families after hospital stays as young children, one for a rash, the other for tuberculosis. A third was seized at his baby-sitter’s home; when his mother tried to rescue him, she was jailed, he said. A fourth recalled that he was taken after his father died, though his mother did not want to give him up. A fifth described being snatched, along with siblings, because his grandfather was a medicine man who wouldn’t give up his traditional ways. As in St. John’s case, no home studies or comparable investigations appear to have been done to support the removals. “Indians had no way to stop white people from taking their kids,” said yet another interviewee. “We had no rights.”

Eighty-five percent of the Native children removed from their families from 1941 to 1967 were placed in non-Indian homes or institutions, said the Association on American Indian Affairs report. The aim, said White Hawk, was assimilation and extinction of the tribes as entities, as their younger generations were removed, year after year—just as it had been with the boarding schools.

“We can’t be afraid to use words like genocide,” said summit participant Anita Fineday, White Earth Band of Ojibwe, managing director of Casey Family Programs’ Indian child-welfare programs and a former chief judge at White Earth Tribal Nation. “The endgame, the official federal policy, was that the tribes wouldn’t exist.”

[strawberryspooktacular]

STRAWBERRY SPOOKTOBER WRAP UP

To wrap up Strawberry Spooktober, we have selected our best pair picks sorted into the best, the worst and so bad it’s good. We also chose 3 personal favourites and a few Honorable mentions. V stands for Vic N stands for Nic

Pair favourites:

Good:

The Ritual (Before: 9.5, After: 10.5)

V: I liked the monster and the design of said monster, but I really liked the fact that the monster was a monster of guilt, or rather a monster that fed on guilt. Being Native, specifically Cherokee, this monster really like, brought my ancestors up from the dead and I immediately wanted to worship the monster.

N: This movie was atmospheric, it had a definite link to Norse mythology and the runes on the house and trees were accurate. It was an interesting and different idea of a horror movie based on Norse mythology. The only downside was their lack of knowing directions, THE SUN IS IN THE WEST OR THE EAST. 

Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (Before: 9.5, After: 10.5)

V: I liked the hillbillies and the way the college kids all died. Even if that’s an awful thing to say.

N: This movie was a comedy horror which is always a favourite genre to mix. The twist of the classic hillbillies being the protagonists and the college kids being the antagonists makes for amazing hyjinx. Chad the villain was 100% terrifying and creepy while Tucker and Dale made for compelling unlikely heroes

Mandy  (Before: 9, After: 10.5)

V: NIC CAGE GOES BATSHIT INSANE AND KILLS A LOT OF CULTISTS. AND THERE WAS A PENIS ON THE SCREEN FOR WAY TOO LONG. 10/10 WOULD RECOMMEND. 

N: Mandy is an insane look through the eyes of a mad man. Nicolas Cage does LSD in the woods and is attacked by LSD bikers and cultists. It’s funny and insane, the visuals are great and the funny bits are hilarious.

So Bad It’s Good:

Tremors  (Before: 9.5, After: 9.5)

V: Kevin Bacon’s Ass, especially in those Jeans™️. Being from Oklahoma, this movie actually really scared me when I first watched it (because it takes place like an hour and a half drive from me) and rewatching it reminded me of the first time I watched it with my Grandpa.  

N: A delightfully 90s film, so 90s it might as well be singing Smash Mouth. A younger Kevin Bacon plays an amazing character and the pure idea of the movie was amazing. The only problem was the slightly anti climactic ending. 

Sleepwalkers  (Before: 8.5, After: 8)

V: I loved the cats (and the actors) and I kind of loved the monsters, but not the design. They could have done the design of the monsters much better in my opinion. 

N: A look into one of the more strange movies of the Steven King franchise. The concept of the monsters was good but the execution was lacking. However, the movie has some funny moment and some incredible animal actors, particularly Clovis the cat.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Before: 8, After: 8)

V: I loved the 70s feel of the entire movie and the insanity of the whole movie, but the abuse of antiques and instruments really hurt me. 

N: This movie captures the feels of 70s horror movies perfectly. Really the movie is made to be corny and so bad it’s good. Leather face was fun and weirdly relatable but the sheriff was creepy, although he was made to be that way.

The Worst™️:

Silence of the Lambs  (Before: 6.5, After: 6.5)

V: I really didn’t like this movie. It gave me really bad anxiety for some reason and even now, I’m not sure why it happened. I did like the characters and the actors’ take on the characters. 

N: This movie was good in its plot and main characters. Hannibal and Buffalo Bill are especially creepy and a perfect snapshot of a psychotic mind. However many of the characters felt under developed, such as the creepy 

28 Days Later  (Before: 8, After: 4.5)

V: This movie was just awful. The zombies didn’t really make sense and acted more like humans instead of actual zombies. And we didn’t even see the zombies that much because there were only like 10 zombies. However I did like the actor playing the chained up zombie. 

N: This movie was strange, it felt like three separate themed movies pushed into one. The beginning of the movie was a classic zombie movie set in London, then it turned into a family fun road trip before ending on a dystopian after apocalypse movie. The music never fit any part of this movie, the main character turned into a ninja 5 days after waking from a coma, there were 10 zombies in the last hour of the movie and they acted like humans. Also IT RAINED ONCE IN THE ENTIRE MOVIE, SET IN ENGLAND. 

The Borderlands  (Before: 7.5, After: 5)

V: THE ASSHOLE OF THE CHURCH; how did that ending fit into the movie? I did like Deacon and Grey, and the setting of the movie itself was good. I did like that for being a found-footage film, the video wasn’t shaky.

N: This movie started well, this movie actually was a good movie for the majority of the running time. The characters were well developed and well balanced in humour and seriousness, the setting was pretty and it was a different take on a found footage movie. HOWEVER THE ENDING WAS TERRIBLE, CONFUSING AND OUTRIGHT WRONG.

Vic’s Picks:

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark  (Before: 9, After: 10)

I really enjoyed the monster designs and the fact that at least one of the monster’s actors was actually doing the stunts that are in the movie. I loved that they didn’t make the ending sad, like they could have, but they gave the characters a happy ending after all the nonsense they went through.

As Above So Below  (Before: 7, After: 9)

I wasn’t expecting this movie to be one of my favourites, but it was. I loved the story and the locations that they filmed at and the characters. I wasn’t a huge fan of the jumpscares, but the ones they did have weren’t unnecessary.  

My Bloody Valentine  (Before: 9, After: 10)

I love Jensen Ackles and I loved the twist ending. The 3D was also really well done and hilarious to watch in 2D, because it didn’t really work as well as if we had watched it in 3D. I do have to say that the villain design was terrifying and I did enjoy hearing my History major girlfriend geek out about coal mines. 

Nic’s Picks:

The Pyramid  (Before: 9, After: 10)

This movie was a different take on the Egyptain pyramid horror movie, not focusing on the classic mummy but instead on Egyptain mythology, specifically the gods and the journey to the underworld. The father and daughter relationship was well developed and the found footage format was given up to ensure that important scenes were captured well toward the end. And it was cute to see my girlfriend geek out on the Egyptain gods.

Trick r Treat  (Before: 10, After: 10)

Four different movies about a horror filled Halloween night, all linked together in the end and done well. Each story was unique with its own twists and amazing monsters. The children in this movie were adorable, even the evil one.

Troll Hunter  (Before: 10, After: 10)

A Norwegian horror movie in a food footage style but told well through the eyes of college students doing a report for a project. Hans, the troll hunter they follow, is wonderful in his grouchy demeanor of a man worn with the world. The trolls themselves were wonderful in their lore and the use of CGI.

Honorable Mentions:

Grave Encounters  (Before: 8, After: 9)

V: Surprisingly, I really liked the jumpscares in this movie.

N: A found footage movie set in an abandoned asylum with a lot of good jumpscares and a creepy atmosphere overall.

Apostle  (Before: 8.25, After: 8)

V: I really liked Micheal Sheen in this movie and I really liked the cult, before they started killing people.

N: A cult centred horror movie set on a small island, Micheal Sheen is always good and the monster design was incredible but the movie was a little slow to start with some plot holes.

Dog Soldiers  (Before: 9, After: 9)

V: The werewolves were so beautifully designed and I really liked the story and the actors themselves, ESPECIALLY THE DOG ACTOR. 

N: A werewolf horror movie set in scotland with great characters, well designed werewolves and THE BEST DOG.

Joy Ride  (Before: 8.5, After: 9)

V: The truckers and the whole concept of this crazy journey that the characters take throughout the movie was really good.

N: A very American horror film set around a very creepy truck driver that relies on atmosphere and actual threat rather that jumpscares. And Jim Beaver is always a plus.

Thirteen Ghosts  (Before: 7, After: 9)

V: I loved Dennis and the makeup was well done. 

N: A ghostly horror movie set around a strange mansion and a ritual, the make was done well and the characters, particularly Dennis and Maggie, were well developed and fun.

Puppet Master  (Before: 6.5, After: 8.25)

V: Cuddly Bear was great, the actors were great, and the cast was diverse. 

N: This movie had well designed scary puppets, good physical effects and a great cast of characters.

Deep Blue Sea  (Before: 9, After: 9.5)

V: The sharks were beautiful and I loved that the sharks had a reason for attacking instead of just attacking for the sake of attacking.

N: A different take on shark horror movie with Samuel L Jackson and LL Cool J as amazing characters with some incredible physical effects.

Winchester  (Before: 7.5, After: 9.5)

V: I really liked the costume and makeup design for this movie. 

N: A movie centred around a real ghostly horror story and house with amazing effects and a great cast with developed characters

Don’t Knock Twice  (Before: 6.5, After: 8.5)

V: The ending was a huge twist, the monster design was beautiful, and the actors were great at setting the scene for the scary things to happen.

N: A Welsh horror movie with a well written story, great cast with a good range of emotions, a lot of terrifying jumpscares, a good monster design and a twist ending.

[lyledebeast]

My Sins Return to Visit Me: Atrocities, Whiteness, and Cosmic Justice in The Patriot

As he watches over the body of his slain son just before The Patriot's final battle, Benjamin Martin confides to his friend, Harry Burwell, that he believes Gabriel's death is some kind of divine repayment for his past wrongs: "I have long feared that my sins would return to visit me, and the cost is more than I can bear." This line also appears at the very beginning of the film, replacing scenes that were filmed but not included in any released edition featuring Martin's actions at Fort Wilderness during the French and Indian War years prior. We hear it in a voice over as Martin closes the trunk lid on his Cherokee tomahawk. Not only is he haunted by his past, but this representation of the American Revolution is haunted by the Cherokee people in spite of writer Rob Rodat and director Rolad Emmerich's attempts to erase them. Although the narrative brushes Martin's words here off as simple grief, I would argue that this reading of his past is more historically honest than the one the film's ending suggests.

In a broad sense, this film appropriates Native identity for the Patriots in the same way Benjamin Martin appropriated that tomahawk. In The Patriot's logic, these men defeated the British because they were fighting to protect their homes and families, they knew the terrain well from a lifetime spent living on it, and they made use of guerilla tactics to gain an advantage over stronger forces. Meanwhile, the British, personified by Colonel Tavington, are brutal colonizers motivated only by greed. It is not hard to see how including Native characters would trouble this interpretation. Only one scene in the film features any, scouts who drop off the single survivor of Benjamin Martin's massacre in the woods at Colonel Tavington's camp. Apart from this, the only onscreen representation the Cherokees have is Martin's tomahawk, and the film only tells their story through the lens of his memories.

Ironically, presenting the Patriots as "native" ends up meaning Tavington's treatment of them bears striking resemblance to historical Patriots' treatment of the Cherokees and other tribes. It is unclear how many homes Tavington has targeted in the beginning of his screentime to have earned the nickname "the Butcher" that General O'Hara informs us about, but after Cornwallis allows him to resume these tactics, he burns eight Patriot homes, killing the inhabitants before burning Pembroke Church with its congregation inside. A few years prior from 1776-1777, a period the film skips over, Patriot forces had waged war against the Cherokee nation for its support of the British crown with devastating effects. Historian Jordan Baker writes in "The Cherokee-American War from the Cherokee Perspective:"

"All along the border, American troops launched a scorched earth campaign. And with each victory the Continental forces earned, they burned Cherokee towns and took survivors prisoner. By the end of the campaign, they had destroyed over fifty Cherokee towns, including crops and livestock, and killed hundreds of Cherokee, enslaving the survivors and sending them as far off as the Caribbean."

Among Tavington's first lines in the film are orders surely similar to those Continental officers gave in the aforementioned Cherokee towns: "Fire the house and barns. Let it be known that if you harbor the enemy, you will lose your home." Even the worst excesses of Tavington's cruelty have more in common with Americans' treatment of Native peoples after the war than any British actions during it. For example,

"In March 1782, after Indian attacks upon American settlements on the western frontier, militiamen under the command of Col. David Williamson attacked the Moravian Christian Mission at Gnadenhutten. Peaceful Delaware Indians, who had converted to Christianity, were rounded up, and ninety-six Delaware Indians, men, women, and children, were bludgeoned to death."

Perhaps most ironically, Tavington's lust for the Ohio valley is a sentiment that historically belonged to his enemies. According to Jason Edwin Anderson, American land speculators, including George Washington, had designs on this region, but the Royal Proclamation of 1763 recognized Native sovereignty there and barred settlement beyond the Appalachian Mountains. As a result, expansion was a stronger motive for independence than freedom from British tyranny in the western colonies. In almost every case, Tavington's atrocities and the reasons behind them are displaced American ones. Under different circumstances, he would have been a model Patriot.

Reading The Patriot by light of the Native stories it erases makes it less a story of hardy pioneers and their effete oppressors than of one set of brutal colonizers being given a taste of their own medicine by a slightly more recently arrived brutal colonizer. However, there are a couple of crucial and related differences between Tavington's fictional atrocities and the Patriots' historical ones. First, Tavington's reach is far more restricted. General Cornwallis grants him permission to utilize brutal tactics solely in service of capturing Martin. He does not direct his other officers to coordinate with Tavington and kill as many rebels as possible. Why? In Cornwallis's words, "These colonials are our brethren." Not "These colonials will be our brethren after we win the war," which would suggest a political meaning to "brethren." That they are brethren now suggests that this brotherhood is based in something unchangeable, like race.

Even Martin concedes the humanity of British soldiers; he offers Rawlins a bounty for their gear, not their scalps. His disposal of his enemies at Fort Wilderness also evinces a more profound hatred for Native people; he sends a raft full of heads and two men alive "to tell the tale" to the French fort but baskets of eyes, tongues, and fingers to the Cherokees with no one to explain what happened. Tavington holds Whiteness in no such esteem. He murders people of color, too, shooting some Black men for refusing to give him information, but their fate pales in comparison to the one that awaits the White congregation of Pembroke Church for the same reason. What appears to make Tavington's actions so aberrant in this context, and so shocking to the film's heroes even after he does the same things numerous times, is not their brutality or that they are directed against non-combatants, but that he targets other White people.

I can't help wondering how the Cherokees would have reacted to their ally in red and green had they been present in the film to do so. I imagine very different responses. On the one hand, some might have felt apprehension about the Patriot retribution that would follow Tavington's actions stemming from their own memories of Fort Wilderness. Others, also with Fort Wilderness on their minds, may have felt that Tavington had thrown the party of the year at Pembroke Church and rudely failed to invite them. Surely some of the scouts who bring Tavington the survivor are the right age to have received Martin's baskets from Fort Wilderness as children, but they are denied the opportunity for vengeance that Martin so eagerly indulges for himself. That would have been an even more fitting means of Martin's sins returning to visit him, if that was indeed what the filmmakers were aiming for.

Instead, they retreated even further from Cherokee representation than originally intended. The extended cut features a very brief scene in which Captain Bordon informs Tavington that the Cherokee scouts have arrived, and the two officers approach two scouts who stand facing them before the camera cuts away. In the theatrical release, the scene opens on the scouts' backs as they walk through the camp, and the camera cuts to Tavington and Bordon entering the tent where the wounded private is being treated. Apparently even showing Tavington in the same frame with Cherokee men emphasizes too clearly that the British were allied to people many Patriots, Martin obviously included, viewed as subhuman.

If Martin did maintain his view of the loss Tavington visited on him as a kind of cosmic justice, it would make him a far more interesting and reflective character. It would mean he recognized, on some level, that there was a price to pay for his horrific, racially-motivated violence beyond just feeling guilty. Moreover, it would have acknowledged that American imperialism was no less greedy and destructive than British imperialism. If the film supported that reading, Martin might have died along with Tavington, or at the very least lost his ill-gotten gains. Instead, the film ends with him watching the construction of his new home in the exact spot where the former one stood with the sun beaming down on him and his family.* After ordering Wilkins to burn the church, Tavington tells him, "This will be forgotten," but here we are clearly meant to have forgotten about Martin's atrocities already. This becomes more poignant when we consider that the same Royal Proclamation of 1763 that forbad British settlement beyond the Appalachian Mountains also granted land to men who had served in the French and Indian War, including 3,000 acres to captains, the rank Benjamin Martin held. Not only did he commit similar atrocities to Tavington, but he received the very reward for them that Tavington covets, and from the same hands. For all Martin's claims to feel guilt over his past actions, his life is a brutal tactics success story, one only reinforced by the film's ending.

*Some commentors have argued that the house being rebuilt is actually Charlotte's. While I don't think that's the case, it would still support my point. Charlotte's house was the larger of the two. presumably with even more land attached. It's an upgrade!

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 11.15 (before 1970)

655 – Battle of the Winwaed: Penda of Mercia is defeated by Oswiu of Northumbria. 1315 – Growth of the Old Swiss Confederacy: The Schweizer Eidgenossenschaft ambushes the army of Leopold I in the Battle of Morgarten. 1532 – Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire: Commanded by Francisco Pizarro, Spanish conquistadors under Hernando de Soto meet Incan Emperor Atahualpa for the first time outside Cajamarca, arranging for a meeting in the city plaza the following day. 1533 – Francisco Pizarro arrives in Cuzco, the capital of the Inca Empire. 1705 – Rákóczi's War of Independence: The Habsburg Empire and Denmark win a military victory over the Kurucs from Hungary in the Battle of Zsibó. 1760 – The secondly-built Castellania in Valletta is officially inaugurated with the blessing of the interior Chapel of Sorrows. 1777 – American Revolutionary War: After 16 months of debate the Continental Congress approves the Articles of Confederation. 1806 – Pike Expedition: Lieutenant Zebulon Pike spots a mountain peak while near the Colorado foothills of the Rocky Mountains. It is later named Pikes Peak in his honor. 1842 – A slave revolt in the Cherokee Nation commences. 1849 – Boilers of the steamboat Louisiana explode as she pulls back from the dock in New Orleans, killing more than 150 people. 1864 – American Civil War: Union General William Tecumseh Sherman begins his March to the Sea. 1884 – The Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 met on 15 November 1884, and after an adjournment concluded on 26 February 1885, with the signature of a General Act, regulating the European colonisation and trade in Africa during the New Imperialism period. 1889 – Brazil is declared a republic by Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca as Emperor Pedro II is deposed in a military coup. 1899 - Second Boer War: Battle of Chieveley, a British armored train is ambushed and partially derailed. British lose the battle, with 80 soldiers captured, along with war correspondent Winston Churchill. 1917 – Eduskunta declares itself the supreme state power of Finland, prompting its declaration of independence and secession from Russia. 1920 – The first assembly of the League of Nations is held in Geneva, Switzerland. 1920 – The Free City of Danzig is established. 1922 – At least 300 are massacred during a general strike in Guayaquil, Ecuador. 1928 – The RNLI lifeboat Mary Stanford capsizes in Rye Harbour with the loss of the entire 17-man crew. 1933 – Thailand holds its first election. 1938 – Nazi Germany bans Jewish children from public schools in the aftermath of Kristallnacht. 1942 – World War II: The Battle of Guadalcanal ends in a decisive Allied victory. 1943 – The Holocaust: German SS leader Heinrich Himmler orders that Gypsies are to be put "on the same level as Jews and placed in concentration camps". 1951 – Nikos Beloyannis, along with 11 comrades, is sentenced to death for attempting to reestablish the Communist Party of Greece. 1955 – The first part of the Saint Petersburg Metro is opened. 1957 – Short Solent 3 crashes near Chessell. 1965 – Craig Breedlove sets a land speed record of 600.601 mph (966.574 km/h) in his car, the Spirit of America, at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. 1966 – Project Gemini: Gemini 12 completes the program's final mission, when it splashes down safely in the Atlantic Ocean. 1967 – The only fatality of the North American X-15 program occurs during the 191st flight when Air Force test pilot Michael J. Adams loses control of his aircraft which is destroyed mid-air over the Mojave Desert. 1968 – The Cleveland Transit System becomes the first transit system in the western hemisphere to provide direct rapid transit service from a city's downtown to its major airport. 1969 – Cold War: The Soviet submarine K-19 collides with the American submarine USS Gato in the Barents Sea. 1969 – Vietnam War: In Washington, D.C., 250,000-500,000 protesters staged a peaceful demonstration against the war, including a symbolic "March Against Death".

[oklahomahistory]

Creek Civil War

Centered by the 1810s in the Alabama River Valley, the Upper Creeks were led by the determined Opothleyahola. Though not engulfed in the Yamasee War of a century before, they held conservative, traditionalist beliefs with little interest in assimilating into American culture or embracing American institutions. To the east in Georgia along the Chattahoochee, Ocmulgee, and Flint Rivers, lived the Lower Creeks, who had their own strong leader, William McIntosh. Ironically, though desperate foes of the English and proto-Americans in the Yamasee War, they now possessed a more “progressive" philosophy and favored adoption of most American ways, including education, commerce, technology, and the Christian faith.The philosophical divide between the Upper and Lower Creeks exploded into violent civil war in the Red Stick War (1813-14). Influenced by the great Shawnee chief and war captain Tecumseh, Opothleyahola simultaneously led the Upper Creeks (Red Sticks, for their red war clubs and their shamans’ supposed magical red sticks) into a disastrous alliance with the British during America’s second war with Britain, the War of 1812. The Lower Creeks, meanwhile, sided with the American colonists. This conflict, incited by atrocities such as the Upper Creek massacre of nearly 250 white settlers and Lower Creek men, women, and children at Fort Mims, near Mobile, Alabama, culminated in the Upper Creeks’ bloody defeat at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814. The victorious American forces in that famous fight included General and future President Andrew Jackson, future “Father of Texas” Sam Houston, the Cherokees, the Choctaws, and most of the Lower Creeks. After their landmark pummeling at Horseshoe Bend, the Upper Creeks retreated to a more subtle rejection of American ways. But their anger and bitterness at those—and the Lower Creeks support of them-simmered, to flash into bloodshed again later. The United States government The Creeks voted in a death did more penalty for any tribesman than simmer. who attempted to sell Creek They forced land to white settlers. the Creeks to cede twenty-two million acres of land in Alabama and Georgia and then pressured them to move west. All this triggered long-term as well as shortterm consequences for the tribe. It turned the majority of Creeks so strongly against further land cessions, including an exchange for lands out west, that they determined to give up no more land to the Americans. They also voted in a death penalty for any tribesman who attempted to sell Creek land to white settlers. Sadly, opinions on the land issue were not unanimous within the tribe. “Red Stick” Upper Creeks massacring white settlers, Lower Creeks, and militia in 1813 at Fort Mims, near Mobile, Alabama. Such bloodshed led to the Upper Creeks’ crushing defeat by the U. S. and its Indian allies at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814  Read the entire Oklahoma story in John J. Dwyer’s The Oklahomans: The Story of Oklahoma and Its People volume 1 of a 2-part series on the 46th state and the people who make this state very special.

[ankh4life18]

"There should be White History Month" so we can expose all the evil things white folks have done in history and present that still affect the victims and their descendants till this very day like: 1 Cherokee Trail of Tears 2 Japanese American internment 3 Philippine-American War 4 Jim Crow 5 The genocide of Native Americans 6 Transatlantic slave trade, and the lies that Africans sold other Africans into slavery 7 The Middle Passage 8 The history of White American racism 9 Black Codes 10 Slave patrols 11 Ku Klux Klan 12 The War on Drugs 13 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo 14 How white racism grew out of slavery and genocide 15 How whites still benefit from slavery and genocide 16 White anti-racism 17 The Southern strategy 18 The rape of enslaved women 19 Madison Grant 20 The Indian Wars 21 Human zoos 22 How the Jews became white 23 White flight 24 Redlining 25 Proposition 14 26 Homestead Act 27 Tulsa Riots 28 Rosewood massacre 29 Tuskegee Experiment 30 Lynching 31 Hollywood stereotypes 32 Indian Appropriations Acts 33 Immigration Act of 1924 34 Sundown towns 35 Chinese Exclusion Act 36 Emmett Till 37 Vincent Chin 38 Islamophobia 39 Indian boarding schools 40 King Philip’s War 41 Bacon’s Rebellion 42 American slavery compared to Arab, Roman and Latin American slavery 43 History of the gun 44 History of the police 45 History of prisons 46 History of white suburbia 47 Lincoln’s racism and anti-racism 48 George Wallace Governor of Alabama 49 Cointelpro 50 Real estate steering 51 School tracking 52 Mass incarceration of black men 53 Boston school busing riots 54 Man made Ebola and A.I.D.S. 55 Church Bombings and fires in deep south to Blacks 56 Church Shootings 57 How the Irish and Italians became white 58 The Perpetuation of the idea of the “model minority” 59 Housing discrimination 60 Systematic placement of highways and building projects to create ghettos 61. Medical experimentation on poor poc especially Blacks including surgical and gynecological experimentation 62 History of Planned Parenthood 63 Forced Sterilization 64 Cutting children out of pregnant Black mothers as part of lynchings 65 Eurocentric beauty standard falsification 66 Erasure and eradication of al https://www.instagram.com/p/CFzeV9ZDLQf/?igshid=5xir4rjnl68r

[mr-all-black-everything]

White History Month

A Caucasian co-worker and I(Yup! The same one from the last post. Go figure.) were discussing why there should or shouldn’t be a “White History Month”. Nevermind the fact that EVERY MONTH is White History month. But I decided to humor him and play along…

“There should be White History Month” so we can expose all the evil things white folks have done in history and present that still affect the victims and their descendants till this very day like:

1 Cherokee Trail of Tears 2 Japanese American internment 3 Philippine-American War 4 Jim Crow 5 The genocide of Native Americans 6 Transatlantic slave trade, and the lies that Africans sold other Africans into slavery 7 The Middle Passage 8 The history of White American racism 9 Black Codes 10 Slave patrols 11 Ku Klux Klan 12 The War on Drugs 13 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo 14 How white racism grew out of slavery and genocide 15 How whites still benefit from slavery and genocide 16 White anti-racism 17 The Southern strategy 18 The rape of enslaved women 19 Madison Grant 20 The Indian Wars 21 Human zoos 22 How the Jews became white 23 White flight 24 Redlining 25 Proposition 14 26 Homestead Act 27 Tulsa Riots 28 Rosewood massacre 29 Tuskegee Experiment 30 Lynching 31 Hollywood stereotypes 32 Indian Appropriations Acts 33 Immigration Act of 1924 34 Sundown towns 35 Chinese Exclusion Act 36 Emmett Till 37 Vincent Chin 38 Islamophobia 39 Indian boarding schools 40 King Philip’s War 41 Bacon’s Rebellion 42 American slavery compared to Arab, Roman and Latin American slavery 43 History of the gun 44 History of the police 45 History of prisons 46 History of white suburbia 47 Lincoln’s racism and anti-racism 48 George Wallace Governor of Alabama 49 Cointelpro 50 Real estate steering 51 School tracking 52 Mass incarceration of black men 53 Boston school busing riots 54 Man made Ebola and A.I.D.S. 55 Church Bombings and fires in deep south to Blacks 56 Church Shootings 57 How the Irish and Italians became white 58 The Perpetuation of the idea of the “model minority” 59 Housing discrimination 60 Systematic placement of highways and building projects to create ghettos 61. Medical experimentation on poor poc especially Blacks including surgical and gynecological experimentation 62 History of Planned Parenthood 63 Forced Sterilization 64 Cutting children out of pregnant Black mothers as part of lynchings 65 Eurocentric beauty standard falsification 66 Erasure and eradication of all achievements of Ancient Africa and Kemet 67 White washing of history and cultural practices of poc’s 68 Media manipulation and bias 69 Perpetuation of the myth of reverse racism 70 The history of white cannibalism 71 White fragility 72 White on white crime and white on everybody else crime 73 Irish slavery, Jewish slavery, African slavery, Native American slavery 74 White police officers murdering unarmed men, women, and children and not being convicted for it 75 Population control warfares worldwide 76 Chemtrails 77 Oil spills and chemical dumping in oceans worldwide 78 Water fracking 79 Gmo foods worldwide 80 Monsanto 81 World Wars 1 and 2 82 Wars on indigenous peoples throughout the world 83 Stolen inventions and blueprints from African people and other indigenous people worldwide 84 Steal concepts from cultures worldwide and then corrupt it 85 Mass murders and massacres worldwide 86 Eugenics and the history of sterilization of poc and history of fetal abortions worldwide 87. Flint Michigan water poisoning crisis

and too much more….

Yet you all have convinced the world and your delusional selves that melanated human beings “black” people are perceived as dangerous, unruly, racist, uncivilized, thugs, gangsters etc… Yeah ok not according to historical and present day facts.

Needless to say… We don’t have these types of discussions anymore. 😎😉😂